The prospect of Joe Biden joining Barack Obama’s ticket, which seems to have grown more real in recent days, raises an interesting possibility: another Biden presidential campaign.

Given how his campaign turned out this year, the idea of Biden ever seeking the White House again seems (and probably is) unlikely. But, at least in theory, a tour de force performance as the VP nominee – think Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 – could spark popular interest in a future Biden presidential campaign that was missing in this past one. If Obama were to lose, Biden (again, theoretically) might then have a shot at the 2012 nomination (much the way the ’92 nomination was essentially Bentsen’s for the taking after his ’88 performance).

Alternately, he and Obama could go on to defeat John McCain and his running mate and to win reelection in 2012. Biden would be 73 in 2016, but as a two-term incumbent vice president, he would (like Al Gore, George H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon before him) presumably have a leg up on his party’s presidential nomination if he chose to pursue it. His age would be an issue (he’d turn 74 a few weeks after the election), but it wouldn’t preclude a candidacy: Ronald Reagan was 73 when he was re-elected in 1984, just as Bob Dole was 73 when the G.O.P. nominated him in 1996. And, of course, there’s the example of John McCain this year.

The idea of a future Biden campaign is interesting because if one were to materialize, it would probably set the record for the longest gap between a major presidential contender’s first and last White House campaign. Biden's maiden effort was for the 1988 Democratic nomination, although he dropped out in the fall of 1987. (Before that, he actually came close to jumping into the 1984 Democratic race at the last minute, finally backing off the week after Christmas 1983.) A 2016 White House campaign would come 28 years after Biden’s first effort. That would likely be a record. And if he were to win in ’16 and then seek re-election in 2020, the gap would grow to 32 years. History suggests that presidential candidates aren’t supposed to enjoy that kind of longevity.

For most serious candidates, this gap is never longer than 16 years. Dick Gephardt, for instance, was a fresh-faced newcomer when he ran in 1988 and a worn-out Washington insider when he ran his second and final campaign in 2004. The gap was also 16 years for Ronald Reagan (he briefly sought the 1968 G.O.P. nomination and last ran in 1984); Bob Dole (he first sought the G.O.P. nomination in 1980 and finally won it in ’96); George McGovern (he filled in for Robert Kennedy in the run-up to the ’68 convention and ran his last campaign in 1984); and Jerry Brown (1976 and 1992). Going back further in history, the record seems to belong to Henry Clay, who ran five times between 1824 and 1848.

There are plenty of fringe candidates with longer gaps between their first and last campaigns, most famously Harold Stassen, who ran nine times between 1948 and 1992. He was a contender in ’48 and 1952, but was never treated seriously after that. Eugene McCarthy suffered a similar fate, waging credible campaigns in 1968 and ’72 but being ignored in ’76, ’88 and ’92.

Interestingly, Biden’s theoretical reach for the longevity record could face competition from Al Gore, who was just 39 when he sought the 1988 Democratic nomination. In other words, he’s still young enough – and certainly more than popular enough – to make another serious White House run four or eight years from now.

So you would hear from John R. Pennington nothing about the battles of North Africa and Italy; nothing about the beaches of Normandy, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Over by the Capitol, civilians armed with tape recorders were seated in a tent and encouraging old men and women to tell their stories about the war in the North Atlantic, in Burma, or in Army hospitals close to the front lines. John R. Pennington had nothing to say about that.

Nevertheless, men and women in shorts and T-shirts pointed in his direction, stopped to shake his hand, to pose for a picture with children, to thank him for his service. Among the thousands of old soldiers, so many of them shrunken and frail, John R. Pennington certainly stood out as he surveyed the granite, gold stars and fountains of the new memorial. Save for his shoes, which were brown and new, he was wearing the very uniform he wore 60 years ago, when the coming of peace saved him from combat. His waistline and his posture conceded nothing to time and gravity.

Another old soldier, paunchy and stooped, stopped and stared. "The last time I saw that uniform," he told Mr. Pennington, "the guy wearing it was inside a casket." The two men laughed.

Mr. Pennington was dressed in the brown woolen uniform of the Army Air Corps, a relic of another age, before the Air Force became a separate branch of the armed forces. He was delighted when a fortysomething stranger took a look at the uniform and said, "So you were a sergeant in the Army Air Corps"-not as a question, but as a fact.

"That's pretty good," he said. "Not everybody knows that." A middle-aged man interrupted, and asked Mr. Pennington-Sergeant Pennington-to pose for a picture with his son, who was no more than 10. "That's great," the boy's father said. They shook hands, and Mr. Pennington was on his way.

Mr. Pennington's war now belongs to the ages; the war that may define that 10-year-old boy's life has only just begun. Among the many differences between these two conflicts-the war on fascism then, the war on Islamic terrorism now-is the sense of shared sacrifice. When the G.I. generation went to war, observed one World War II veteran, "everybody was giving something" to the war effort. Some gave their sons and daughters, husbands and wives. Others gave their labor; others, their scrap iron and their rubber and even their bacon fat. Today, however, "only a few are" sacrificing, said the veteran, a man named Bob Dole.

The former Senator, his right arm famously made useless during the Italian campaign, shared a Memorial Day platform with a onetime colleague and fellow veteran, George McGovern, during the reunion weekend. These two old men, seemingly divided by party and ideology, shared a common and unforgettable experience when they were young. They were soldiers in a brutal war whose justice was never questioned. The bonds formed of that common experience transcend other differences, and as the two men spoke of and to each other with obvious affection and respect, it was hard not to contrast their civility with today's talk-show politics of ridicule and contempt.

George McGovern, a man whose very name is associated-grotesquely-with pacifism and loony leftism, was a bomber pilot who won the Distinguished Flying Cross for getting his Liberator home despite the loss of three of its four engines. Like most soldiers who have lost friends and seen horrible sights, Mr. McGovern and Mr. Dole clearly despise war. And yet they know that the world is a dangerous place, and that liberty doesn't come without cost. "There has never been a day when I would not have given my life for the defense of my country," Mr. McGovern said in that familiar soft voice of his.

The G.I. generation helped save not just the nation, but the world itself from what Winston Churchill called "the abyss of a new Dark Age." But as the G.I.'s recede into the history books, new threats have revealed themselves. This time, civilization's enemies do not espouse what Churchill called a "perverted science," but a twisted form of religion. Its adherents have made plain their cause: conquest and death, not co-existence and toleration.

The new war belongs to a new generation. The G.I.'s have done their work. Now, they leave their example.

I was sitting in a large army tent pitched on the Mall, in the company of a couple of dozen Vietnam vets, one of whom-a bearded, wiry little guy with a terrific sense of humor and an inexhaustible supply of mescaline-was temporarily using my other shoulder as a resting place for the stump that had been his left leg. He'd just asked how come I was wearing a South Vietnamese officer's jacket with the word "TIME" embroidered over the pocket, and I was about to explain-that's when I felt the tap.

I turned to see John Kerry, who two years earlier had been a lieutenant commanding a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta. In the last few weeks he'd become more friend than source. "What's up?" I said.

He dropped into a Vietnamese squat and whispered, "Come with me."

Wondering what the mystery was all about, I waited until my buddy eased back on his crutches, then followed Mr. Kerry out of the tent. Outside, the air was unusually cool. Up and down the Mall were other tents filled with vets-more than 1,000-hunkered down, telling stories of the 'Nam and speculating about the next day's operation: one last cadence-counting, flags-flying, weeping, cheering, wheelchair-rolling march up Pennsylvania Avenue to throw down their medals on the steps of the United States Capitol.

John Kerry-the most decorated of those who called each other "brother"-was going to be walking point.

"So?" I said, as we stood under the stars, hugging ourselves against the chill.

He smiled. "I got a better place for you to sleep."

I trailed after him to a parking lot where half a dozen former junior officers in fatigues were leaning against a Mercedes sedan. John made introductions, assuring them that though not a vet, and in the employ of a publication that had declared Vietnam "the right war in the right place at the right time," I had spent a stretch of involuntary quality time with those who'd been shooting at them not long before. That seemed to satisfy, and we set off in the Merc toward our objective, which turned out to be a Georgetown townhouse belonging to an assistant something or other at the Pentagon. He was away for the evening, but had left a key, which John extracted from his uniform blouse and fitted into the lock of the front door.

"Talk about being in the enemy camp," I said, as it swung open.

He laughed. "The owner's a good guy. He said we could use his 'hooch' for the night."

We repaired to the walnut-paneled library, liberated a bottle of vintage brandy from an antique cabinet, and plopped down on expensively upholstered couches and easy chairs. As combat boots settled on what looked to be a George II coffee table, our leader offered a solemn toast:

"Brothers who didn't come home."

I caught his eye as I lifted my crystal snifter. Something told me that the chiseled-faced young man looking back had big things in store for him.

John Kerry has indeed made a name for himself since leading the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But these days-I haven't seen him since that April night in 1971-he's catching it because of that long-ago protest march. On the Internet and, if you can believe it, on the floor of the House of Representatives, the holder of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts is being called a traitor: "Hanoi John." Vets are being dragged off American Legion barstools to say that he's no better than those who supposedly spat on them and called them "baby-killers"-an urban legend that ranks right up there with feminist bra-incinerators. A phony photograph has been circulated showing him communing with Jane Fonda. There's even been mockery about one of his wounds: A retired lieutenant commander dismissed it in The Boston Globe as "a fingernail scrape." (Easy to say, if you've never been hit by shrapnel.)

From the REMFs, as we used to call them in Vietnam (you'll have to ask a vet what it means), such behavior is S.O.P.; the surprise is that they're getting some of their ammunition straight out of John Kerry's mouth.

The latest convolution to issue therefrom concerns the discarded medals: How many? Whose? What kind? According to the Kerry campaign, it's a "right-wing fiction" that he ever threw away any. Of his medals, that is. Ribbons-duplicates of which are available in any Army-Navy store-are different. He did toss those. The medals he left on the Capitol steps belonged to other people who couldn't make it to the march.

Leave it to The New York Times to come up with a videotape of Mr. Kerry saying something quite different during a television interview in November 1971. Asked how many medals he flipped onto the steps, Mr. Kerry (befuddled, perhaps, by the absurdity of the query) replied: "I can't remember, six, seven, eight, nine."

In 1984, while running for Senate, he presented the revised version to The Boston Globe : He still had his own medals (he offered to show them to an upset union man); he'd thrown someone else's. That zig would be followed 12 years later by a zag. Asked by The Globe why he hadn't thrown his own ( doesn't anyone at that paper have better things to do? ), Mr. Kerry explained that he "didn't have time to go home and get them."

None of this matters-unless it's a sign of things to come.

What compels Mr. Kerry to stick his foot in it? Pretending he never heard of Jane Fonda-who reportedly helped finance the VVAW-one can understand; there was, after all, that memorable pin-up of her perched on a 37-millimeter anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi. But why backtrack on a gesture that was self-sacrificing, deeply felt (whatever came out of his hand) and crucial in establishing him as the figure he is today?

Mr. Kerry has also been shimmying about what he said three decades ago in Senate testimony on the subject of U.S. troops committing war crimes. He claims: not a word. "No," Mr. Kerry told CNN's Judy Woodruff in February. "I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. And if you read what I said, it is very clearly an indictment of leadership. I said to the Senate, 'Where is the leadership of our country?' And it's the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers. I never said that."

Mr. Kerry is half-right. He did, most eloquently, tear into the politicians and bureaucrats who sent young men off to die without purpose or point. But another of those darned videotapes exists, and it shows Mr. Kerry, equally eloquent, enumerating rapes; cut-off ears, heads and limbs; genitals wired to portable telephone sets with the juice turned on high; randomly shot-at civilians; razed villages-"in fashion," as he put it, "reminiscent of Genghis Khan."

What the right usually leaves out about this tape is that Mr. Kerry isn't accusing, he's reporting , word for word, the confessions of 150 vets during a VVAW-sponsored conference in Detroit only weeks before. Moreover, Mr. Kerry-unlike another decorated Vietnam vet named Kerrey who now sits in judgment on others' faults-did not exempt himself. "I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed," he said during an appearance on Meet the Press shortly before his Senate testimony. "I took part in shooting in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire …. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages."

There should be medals for that kind of guts, too.

So why back away? Especially now, when the stakes are just as high as they were in Vietnam?

A craven press is badgering him, and so are ideologues still trying to win a justly lost war. But mostly John Kerry is suffering from a condition that strikes liberal Presidential candidates the moment they begin to taste it-"it" being the shock that they might actually hear "Hail to the Chief" whenever they walk into a room, if they play their cards right. And that means: don't seem too liberal, and explain away, deny, revise, trim or flat-out lie about all past events, beliefs and statements that got you the Democratic nomination in the first place.

It happened to another friend of mine in 1972. His name was George McGovern; I wrote his authorized campaign biography (he didn't cut out the passages that hit him over the head, which tells you something about McGovern, liberals or both); and for a goodly while, many otherwise sensible folk believed he would end the war by sundown on Inauguration Day, just like he'd promised all through the primaries. But no sooner was the nomination his than Senator McGovern-a decent man if ever there was one (and a brave B-24 pilot, besides)-commenced fudging: Well, maybe halting the fighting would take a little longer than supposed. There were all those P.O.W.'s to get back first, etc., etc. The net on Election Day was Nixon, 49 states; McGovern, 1. (That one, of course, was John Kerry's state.)

There was plenty else awful in the McGovern campaign, and even if the White Knight from the Dakota plains had stayed pure, the best result might have been a few more states shaded blue. But at least the people who'd worked so hard and believed so utterly would have felt better; "McGovern" wouldn't have become an expletive; Jimmy Carter might still be planting peanuts; and Howard Dean wouldn't have had the crypto-Republican Democratic Leadership Council to kick around, because it wouldn't have existed. In which case, no one outside of Little Rock would ever have heard of a couple named Bill and Hillary. See what happens when you ignore what Mother said about fibbing?

No one's saying that Mr. Kerry's cooked. But McGovern parallels give him a toasted look he didn't get skiing in Sun Valley.

The solution? Well, for starters, friend of days gone by, lay your hands on a tape of your 1971 Senate testimony; have Bob Shrum turn it into a TV commercial. Air it morning, noon and night.

Stop apologizing for the good things you've done. You were a hero, O.K.? During the war, and after. Maybe especially after. Besides, you'll have ample opportunity to apologize for real screw-ups as the campaign moves along.

And take a good look at what's happening in Falluja. Are the Marines getting anywhere sitting around waiting for the bad guys to make nice? All that's happening is that the fellas in the checkered scarves are getting good target practice.

Same with your enemies on the right. Retreat, they smell blood. Smack 'em, they behave. True, it's not very St. Paul's-but you do want to hear them play that song, don't you?

Oh, yes, just in case anyone asks you about Jane Fonda again, remember: When she was manning that Commie ack-ack gun, American pilots had clear sailing.

It's the Night of the Big Defeat, Election Night 1972, at McGovern campaign headquarters in the Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls, S.D., and after drinking a little too much, I decide it's necessary for me to put in a call to Alf Landon in Kansas. You might recall good old Alf, who up to then had been the Biggest Loser in Presidential history off his disastrous 1936 run against F.D.R.

I felt someone ought to give Alf (then 85) the good news: that he was no longer the Biggest Loser in history. George McGovern was, in the sense that Landon had won only two states, while McGovern had won only one (and the District of Columbia). At least that's one way of looking at it. I've come to think that George McGovern wasn't a loser at all, that he didn't break my heart-as he seems to have broken Nicholas Kristof's-by losing big. That whether you agree with him or not, he's someone who deserves admiration for conducting a principled campaign against an unprincipled opponent. In addition, I think there is a fundamental misconception about McGovern's loss: blaming it on his fidelity to principles in the first place.

I think that's why certain of the Dean-McGovern comparisons flying around now from concerned Democrats and gleeful Republicans are flawed. They're premised on the belief that Dean will replicate the McGovern defeat because of his rigid adherence to principles. I'm not sure of that, precisely because Dean seems far more a canny opportunist than McGovern, less attached to his principles and more attached to winning. After all, as one snarky blogger suggested in the wake of Saddam's capture, wouldn't strict adherence to principle by those who denounced the war as a terrible mistake require them to call for Saddam's restoration to power, now that we know he's alive? (After all, no weapons of mass destruction have been found yet, just mass graves, and maybe those 300,000 people in mass graves all committed suicide.) And yet Dean was quick to say that the capture was "a great day."

Perhaps the Saddam capture will mean the ultimate letdown for Dean's supporters. ("I can't believe this," Carrie B. posted on a Dean Web site. "I'm crying here. I feel that we now don't have a chance in this election.") But I have to admit, I'd been feeling a kind of envy for the experience the Deanites had been going through up till now, the sudden exhilaration of participating in what seemed like a successful insurgency in a Presidential primary campaign. I had a taste of that feeling covering the McGovern campaign from its insurgent beginnings when I was just starting out as a reporter, and it's a thrill that has stayed with me. As has my admiration for George McGovern.

It's an admiration that I'd come to feel as early as 1968 at the Chicago Hilton, the Democratic Party convention headquarters, in the midst of the riot and the beatings on the street. In a dank banquet room reeking of mildew and tear gas, McGovern gave a sparsely attended press conference, in which he calmly but forthrightly spoke out against the violent treatment of anti-war demonstrators in the streets. He was one of the few Democratic Senators to do so.

It was an admiration that grew four years later as I began covering his campaign as one of the low-ranking "Boys on the Bus" in '72 (when the gifted observer Tim Crouse coined the term). An experience that came to an end with my Election Night phone call to Alf Landon.

My memory is of having just spent the previous couple of hours drinking with Hunter Thompson and some other reporters in the revolving restaurant on the roof of the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn, letting the magnitude of the defeat sink in, sharing doom-laden scenarios of the Nixon years to come. (At least I think it was a revolving restaurant-come to think of it, my own room seemed to be revolving too, and that couldn't be right.)

Anyway, I don't know how I managed to track Alf Landon down at such short notice, but I summoned up some dim memory of his hometown in Kansas from Arthur Schlesinger's F.D.R. bio and it turned out he was listed (Alf, not Arthur Schlesinger). It wasn't like the networks were beating down his door, so he didn't seem to mind chatting.

Nevertheless, Alf didn't seem to be as overjoyed as I expected at the news that he would no longer be a kind of punchline to political jokes about Big Losers. He was quite affable, despite some puzzlement about the motives of his caller. He was comfortable with the campaign he'd run (he was, in fact, a relatively progressive Republican, only recently being given credit for having saved his party from the crypto-fascist forces among the F.D.R.-haters). He said he ran on issues he believed in and didn't regret the loss because he stayed true to his principles, didn't think of himself as a punchline to a joke, and he also had kind words for his fellow big loser, George McGovern.

And, in fact, McGovern hasn't become a punchline so much as a warning sign: Don't run a principled campaign or you'll end up winning only Massachusetts. But maybe it's a misleading warning. Perhaps his loss was foreordained, but I'm not convinced the landslide was. As the campaign was going on, Nixon's bagmen were meeting surreptitiously with the Watergate burglars to deliver wads of hush money from illegal campaign cash. The Watergate cover-up, few knew then, was hanging by a thread at the time of the election, and would only last four months more, when James McCord started spilling the beans to Judge Sirica and the truth about the whole sordid scheme began to emerge. If that truth had come out before the vote … who knows? Would Americans re-elect Richard Nixon as President if they knew the facts that would force him to resign less than two years later?

There was another factor in McGovern's loss, one unrelated to his running a principled campaign: the George Wallace shooting. If Wallace had continued in the direction he seemed to be heading-a strong third-party run-before the bullet struck and paralyzed him, it might have sabotaged Nixon's "Southern strategy" by splitting the race-and-busing bloc that Nixon counted on in both the North and the South. So it's not necessarily true that running on issues made George McGovern such a big loser: It was bagmen and a bullet.

Anyway, I don't regret my call to Alf Landon. The great Murray Kempton always said that the best stories are to be found in the losing locker rooms of history, that you learn more from losers than winners. I had spoken to McGovern earlier that day at some Election Day photo op in which, as I recall, he spoke wistfully of the hunting season coming up and the preference of South Dakota hunters for bagging "early mourning doves." He said-I swear this is true-he liked the sound of their "cooing."

And now I had bagged Alf Landon: two great losers in one day. Little did we know that the Biggest Loser of Them All, now celebrating victory, would be out on his ear in less than two years, the first President to resign in disgrace.

I took the whole McGovern ride, covering the campaign as it rose from nowhere, went Somewhere, and descended into nowhere again that night at the Sioux Falls Holiday Inn. From the time he was using rickety old Ozark Air Lines charter jets, to the point where he had a virtual fleet of campaign planes at his command.

I didn't see it coming in my first trip with McGovern; I didn't think he had much of a chance and made snarky comments in my dispatch about now-deceased Ozark Air Lines. But when it began to happen, it happened fast and it was breathtaking.

The press traveling with Howard Dean must have felt it-might still be feeling it. The boys on the McCain bus surely felt it for a brief moment. But suddenly, crowds were coming out in increasing numbers to greet McGovern at wintry Midwest airstrip stops. First-string national reporters were bigfooting lesser types like myself, who were demoted to the new plane added on, the one that came to be called the "Zoo Plane" (not without cause).

You recall the set-up: Richard Nixon running for re-election with big money and a badly divided Democratic Party, and only Woodward and Bernstein (and later a partly muzzled Cronkite) in the media caring much about Watergate. McGovern, to his credit, did bring up Watergate repeatedly once The Washington Post's first big Woodstein stories ran, but it was looked upon as the desperation of a loser.

Meanwhile, there was the war-you know, the one in Vietnam, which Nixon claimed to be "Vietnamizing." A war which even those, like Robert McNamara, who believed in confronting Soviet ambitions had realized years earlier was senselessly squandering lives and, in effect, undermining any larger purpose as well. (McNamara's confession on that point is one of the many things that makes my friend Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War so important; see my column in the Sept. 29, 2003, issue.)

And there was an anti-war movement that had driven a President from office in 1968 (and, paradoxically, probably helped elect Nixon by denying Humphrey their vote, sort of like the Naderites of 2000 who put the nail in Al Gore's coffin). The wing of the anti-war movement that still had a taste for electoral politics in 1972 (many no longer did) had become very smart and very adept organizers by then; they began capturing caucuses in the winter of '71 and ended up capturing the party in '72. That's one of the nuts-and-bolts journalistic insights beneath the Electric Kool-Aid of Hunter Thompson's prose in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, his collected real-time dispatches: Early on, he picked up on the way a savvy grassroots strategy was giving the McGovern campaign a stealth edge. Like Dean's, the McGovern insurgency leapt into the lead by innovative organizing, by out-organizing their opponents, and they made the McGovern campaign the anti-war movement's campaign.

So it was a movement campaign, like the Goldwater insurgency was a movement campaign. A campaign on issues, an anti-war campaign led by a World War II bomber pilot and prairie populist who came out of nowhere. What impressed me about McGovern was a kind of preternatural calm, which I somehow connected with his having flown through Axis anti-aircraft fire in the war. He didn't have charisma, but his sense of conviction did. And he was so unlike the other candidates.

I'd watched front-runner Ed Muskie sweatily pander to corrupt party bosses and wiseguy union big shots in Cherry Hill, N.J. I'd traveled with the insanely desperate Humphrey campaign, which featured the scariest campaign plane I'd ever traveled in, a loose-bolted prop job that was forever stalling and losing altitude, honking klaxon warnings which went off like shrieking waterfowl as we dipped perilously close to the frightened inhabitants below, though it turned out that almost everyone else on the plane was unnaturally calm, having been sedated by the traveling pharmacy of Humphrey's accommodating personal doctor. (I think I used the honking klaxons as a metaphor for Humphrey's unfortunate rhetorical style, but Hunter Thompson probably put it best when he described Humphrey's campaign personality as akin to "a hen on amyls.")

And then the party had to stop: I was with the Humphrey campaign a few dozen miles away in Maryland when George Wallace was shot, and the whole narrative of the campaign darkened. It was also a reminder of the way that, since 1963, the irrational and the violent have repeatedly intervened in "the process" to change American political history. I did the vigil at Wallace's hospital, and he wasn't the only victim that day. Rent The Parallax View someday, and you'll get a feeling for the shadow of paranoia that repeated assassinations and assassination attempts cast over the national psyche for a long time afterward.

And then there was the bizarre scene at the Democratic National Convention in Miami, starting with the gloriously tacky mirrored glitz of the Fontainebleau Hotel, which served as the convention headquarters.

The Democratic convention itself was a deceptive mirror-image of grim Chicago: the people in the streets then, now in the aisles of the convention hall seizing the party. I remember watching with awe as McGovern floor general Willie Brown (then a San Francisco assemblyman, later mayor) exercised his political wizardry. I was there in the California delegation when the McGovern command made their one pragmatic, non-principled decision. It was some obscure rules issue supported by women's groups that threatened McGovern's momentum. I could hear the anguished discussion: Pulling the rug out from under it might enable McGovern to win a first-ballot victory with dispatch, though at the cost of betraying his allies. And so they did it. When can you say of a campaign that you actually remember its only unprincipled move? Perhaps that was what doomed McGovern: For someone who set the bar so high, perhaps his one instance of being cynical came back to haunt him karmically.

And then the Republican convention, the coronation of Richard Nixon, held in the same town-but Miami was a different city this time, a Secret Service–saturated, police- and National Guard–infested, barbed-wire and tear-gas city.

Re-reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, I was reminded of a peculiarly absurdist moment in that spectacle: when I decided to infiltrate the Youth for Nixon march on the convention floor. Hunter Thompson, it turned out, had the same idea. What actually happened was that I noticed him, he noticed me, we nodded and kept our disguises secure, and eventually both of us marched onto the convention floor with the Nixon Youth to the cheers of the delegates, all on national TV.

Here's the "gonzo" version of the Youth for Nixon march, as Thompson remembered it: "For the first ten minutes I was getting very ominous Hell's Angels flashbacks-all alone in a big crowd of hostile, cranked-up geeks in a mood to stomp somebody."

Then, he says, "I … saw Ron Rosenbaum from The Village Voice, coming at me in a knot of Nixon Youth wranglers. 'No press allowed!' they were screaming …. They had nailed Rosenbaum at the door-but instead of turning back and giving up, he plunged into the crowded room and made a beeline for the back wall, where he'd already spotted me sitting in peaceful anonymity. By the time he reached me he was gasping for breath and about six fraternity/jock types were clawing at his arms."

I like the heroic, battling image of myself, but it didn't happen; nor did the events that Thompson says ensued, in which my cry for help threatens to blow his cover, and Thompson turns on me and tells the Nixon Youth, "Get that bastard out of here!"-at which point, "Rosenbaum stared at me. There was shock and repugnance in his eyes as if he had just recognized me as a lineal descendant of Judas Iscariot."

It's much more entertaining than what happened, but I didn't get as exercised about these embellishments as some did about Thompson's approach to reporting. I thought he was just an amazingly talented writer who wrote an American classic in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (a demonic inversion of Gatsby) and ought to be allowed to do what he did best, a sui generis prose that didn't fit easily into the categories of fiction or nonfiction, but was somehow more true to the reality of that year than the still-dutifully-mimetic prose of the regular White House reporters. Thompson opened up Presidential campaign reporting to the vision of absurdity, the way Norman Mailer had opened it up to a vision of metaphysics. I think in some ways Thompson was more influential, because while Mailer worked aloof, Thompson did much in many ways to "loosen up" (let's say) the rest of the "Boys on the Bus." He gave voice to some of the skepticism the press corps felt about the candidates, and it eventually began to surface in their prose in later campaigns-mostly for the better, I think.

But back to McGovern's campaign. First there was the Vice Presidentialdebacle-remember, McGovern's V.P. choice, Thomas Eagleton, had chosen not to reveal electro-shock treatments for depression that when they were finally disclosed, led him to resign his candidacy and made the McGovern campaign itself a candidate for what the budding cutthroat politico Lee Atwater would call the "jumper cables."

And then there was the crash, the fall campaign. Give George McGovern credit: He stuck to his anti-war message, he tried to make people care about Watergate, he stuck to his principles. The final crushing blow: Henry Kissinger's deceptive proclamation that, as a result of his secret diplomacy, "peace is at hand." Bye-bye, peace issue. It wasn't until after the election that it turned out peace was not really at hand at all. In fact, many more Americans and Vietnamese would die before the end. One can disagree with him on principle (and some of my thinking has changed). But was McGovern wrong to run a principled campaign on this issue? If you think so, you don't believe in the American democratic process.

Anyway, I was there for McGovern's final desperate cross-country dash, whose final leg-from Long Beach to a post-midnight landing in Sioux Falls-was a memorable debauch fueled by (among other things) wild delusory hope and the intimations of the landslide about to hit.

And then, less than two years later, I was there in Washington for the Nixon impeachment hearings, when the full truth about what was going on behind the scenes in that campaign from beginning (the phony letter that led to the demise of Ed Muskie's campaign) to end (the bagmen and the blackmail) finally emerged.

And I was there in the East Room of the White House as a weeping Richard Nixon left by the back door, disgraced.

That was the real end of the McGovern campaign. In some ways, you could say that ultimately he won. His opponent certainly lost. But even if McGovern was the Big Loser who eclipsed Alf Landon, he won my respect because he didn't lose his soul. He demonstrated that it was possible to run a campaign which focused the electorate's attention on the real issue of the day-Vietnam. I may disagree with Dean's supporters, but they have the right to have a candidate who expresses their views faithfully. Howard Dean won't break his supporters' hearts by losing the election; he'll break their hearts if he abandons his principles. Comparing Howard Dean to George McGovern shouldn't be an insult; it's something to live up to.

Johnny, they hardly knew ye.

After nearly 16 years at the helm of the New York Archdiocese, 79-year-old Cardinal O'Connor is preparing for the next stage of his life. Ailing, perhaps more than we know, he has made it clear that somebody new will stand in his place sometime soon. No Cardinal-Archbishop of New York has ever actually retired; they held their positions until summoned to service by an authority higher than even the Pope. Under new rules, however, bishops retire at 75 unless granted an exemption (as Cardinal O'Connor was). Even the exceptions, however, rarely serve beyond age 80, which the Cardinal will be in January.

So, like two-term Presidents approaching their last year in office, the Cardinal has had the unique opportunity to read assessments of his career written in the past tense, and the archdiocese he leads is preparing ever so subtly for a transition. As those retrospectives have piled up in recent months, it would seem, at last, that some people are getting it right: Cardinal O'Connor, son of working-class Philadelphia, has been an extraordinarily complex clergyman, adamant as well as ecumenical; hard-edged and sentimental, a man who built bridges to such seemingly unlikely allies as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Ed Koch, Elie Wiesel and union leader Dennis Rivera. Thankfully, we have come a long way since that paragon of toleration, Gloria Steinem, could say (without apparent fear of contradiction from her equally open-minded peers) that the two worst things about New York were AIDS and Cardinal O'Connor.

He did take some time, it must be said, to get in tune with the music of New York. On the job only a few months, he inserted himself into the 1984 Presidential election, in which the Democrats ran a New York Catholic who favored abortion rights, Geraldine Ferraro, for Vice President after another New York Catholic who favored abortion rights, Mario Cuomo, became a national star at the party's convention. It was a clumsy moment, and it sounded to some that the Cardinal was playing partisan politics. Amazingly, few seemed to think that the Cardinal would be equally as harsh on Republican Catholics who supported abortion rights (as, in later years, he surely was).

Critics at the time said the Cardinal needed a refresher course in the separation of church and state-as memory serves, one newspaper spoke darkly about revoking the Archdiocese's not-for-profit status if the new Cardinal did not cease and desist from political pronouncements. However indelicately His Eminence handled this episode, he at least was too diplomatic to point out that the keepers of church-state relations generally lead the applause when clergy speak out for what are deemed progressive causes.

From that moment, the caricature of Cardinal O'Connor as a right-wing ideologue was set in stone among those who claim that they couldn't possibly be anti-Catholic because, after all, they just love Anna Quindlen, and isn't she, you know, one of them? Such people chose not to notice that as he grew more comfortable in his role and more knowledgeable about the city, the Cardinal became one of New York's most eloquent voices on behalf of the poor (remember them?), a man who used his pulpit to condemn Republican social service cuts in the early 1990's, who demanded better, more accessible health care, and who reaffirmed the Catholic Church's incredible commitment to the education of poor, non-Catholic New Yorkers in some of the city's most forlorn communities.

Cardinal O'Connor served in the U.S. Navy as chief of chaplains and achieved the rank of rear admiral, but he was extremely dubious about the Gulf War, and, on matters of military spending, he sounded like a conservative's parody of that old World War II bomber pilot, George McGovern. My friend Chris Franz of the Staten Island Register reminded me that in 1980, then-Bishop O'Connor had a leading role in writing a pastoral letter on war and peace from the American Catholic hierarchy to its flock. With Bishop O'Connor's active participation, the letter not only questioned the very morality of nuclear deterrence, but called on Catholics working in the defense industry to consult their consciences in light of the bishops' letter.

Such is the man who led New York's Catholics into the new century. This Christmas, he will be on the minds and in the hearts of Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

President Bill Clinton's career has had a different shape. Webster Hubbell, the former No. 3 man in his Justice Department, already did his time before the President's China trip, and the third act is still to be written. What of the trip itself?

It is hard for us to judge President Clinton's effect on China because we are not Chinese. Certainly the speech, the press conference and the question-and-answer sessions will bring no quick changes, and for those who need change desperately-the slave laborers in factories, the Tibetans whose culture has been destroyed, the Christians whose definition of what must be rendered unto Caesar differs from Caesar's-that's tough luck. When national security adviser Samuel (Sandy) Berger celebrates with Tim Russert, they won't be invited.

But the mid- to long-term effects on closed systems of even the smallest cracks can be incalculable. The Pope went to Poland; Solidarity followed. Solidarity was crushed, but where are the men who crushed it now? Bill Clinton is not the Pope. But neither is he Richard Nixon, whose China trip was an exercise in Realpolitik , lowered by sycophancy, which reached its nadir in his effusive post-banquet toasts to his hosts, the assembled tyrants. William F. Buckley Jr., who was in the traveling press corps, wrote one of the great disses of modern journalism: "You almost expected him to lurch into a toast to Alger Hiss."

So President Clinton's little homilies about freedom and prosperity, however wan they sound to us, may prove to be world-historical. The first time is the most important, as nuns, preachers, boys and girls know. When everything has been said, nothing resonates. When nothing may be said, anything can sound like a bugle.

But we also hear what our President has to say, and on us the effects can be demoralizing. When he carried on and on about how freedom brings prosperity, as if that was its only benefit or justification, he sounded like the dullest hack at some particularly bad political convention. Is liberty to be judged by dollars and cents? Hitler put Germany to work making autobahns while we wallowed in the Depression. Should we therefore have started passing out yellow stars? President Clinton was making a specific debaters' point. The oligarchs of Beijing claim that repression is the precondition of stability; if they had not murdered hundreds in Tiananmen Square, millions would not now be prosperous. President Clinton was trying to rebut that devil's calculus. But we can't embargo his foreign utterances. Whatever he says abroad gets played back here, too.

There are tensions within the Presidency forced on it by the differing demands of the role, and by modernity itself. The President is both head of state and chief executive officer, king and prime minister. The direction of the nation's foreign policy is in his hands, and he is the symbol of the nation. In the past, diplomats did the actual jawboning and treaty-signing. With ocean liners and airplanes, Presidents began going abroad-Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nixon. At the same time, the President is a kind of secular spiritual leader-the pontifex maximus of the American civil religion, as Walter Dean Burnham put it. He doesn't just do his many jobs, he tells us why all our jobs are worth doing.

So the modern President must be both advance man and moralist. He must simultaneously go to China and give the Gettysburg Address. Naturally, problems arise. When you decide to deal with a foreign power, you accept certain protocols. You won't show up in the capital and read a sermon, even if the capital has recently been an abattoir. But then you are letting down the home congregation, which looks to you for encouraging words.

What can a President do? He can encourage our realism, without diminishing our principles or their specialness, by periodically reminding us that we are not the leaders of the world, but one nation among many. We will not hesitate to judge others by our standards, and our standards may always be a factor in our dealings with them. But evangelizing for liberty is not our only, or even our driving, purpose. We take care of ourselves. The world must take care of itself.

However well he performs before a crowd, this President has neglected two aspects of an effective China policy. The present-day Realpolitik view of China, as expounded by National Review senior editor Peter Rodman and others, is that China is a conservative great power, not interested in upsetting the world's, or even necessarily Asia's, balance. But any great power by nature tends to expand into available vacuums. The United States should not tempt China by giving it room. That means a commitment to American military power, and to missile defense. We need a Navy capable of sailing through the Formosa Strait, and protection from whatever technologies our satellite companies have frittered away. That means strength and prudence, not meaningless agreements on retargeting Chinese missiles.

The President should also not weaken his own credibility by trolling for campaign contributions from Chinese generals. He already did that? Then see that he keeps his legal defense fund clean, and see that his Vice President, and would-be successor, keeps a watch on glad-handers, operators and temple fund-raisers. If that's impossible, and it probably is, then next time out the Dem- ocrats should give us a neoliberal who isn't corrupt, like Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska.